One of the strengths of horror as a genre is that it’s very malleable. There’s a lot of different types of films that you can comfortably call a “horror” film and still be fairly accurate. You can do horror as action, horror as mystery, horror as thriller, horror as sci-fi, cosmic horror, psychological horror, horror comedy, gross-out horror, etc. And this is, of course, without getting into the huge variety of theme and tone and subject matter that is open. This means there’s pretty much a horror film for everyone. It also means that sometimes you have to really stop and think, “wait, is this a horror movie?” And that’s part of what is happening with Adam Wingard’s 2014 film, The Guest.

The Guest opens with a shot of a man running through vast, open fields somewhere in what looks to be the Midwest. He makes his way to the home of Laura Peterson, and introduces himself as “David” and claims to be a friend of her son Caleb, who died in Afghanistan. It becomes clear that the Peterson family has been largely broken by Caleb’s death, Laura and her husband Spencer particularly, but youngest son Luke and daughter Anna are clearly rebelling or retreating in various ways from the trauma of losing Caleb. Laura insists that “David” stay a few days, since it clear he has nowhere to go, and despite Spencer’s objections and Anna’s distrust, “David” quickly wins over the family. He fills Spencer’s need for a son he can relate to on an adult level, and Luke and Anna’s need for a big brother figure. The Peterson’s are so happy to have “David” around they overlook some warning signs, such as a peculiar lack of sleep, and a capacity for extraordinary violence and emotional manipulation. Anna eventually realizes that “David” is not who he says he is after he kills two minor criminals and frames her drug-dealing boyfriend for the crime, and her investigations trigger the arrival of a clandestine military contracting group to retrieve “David” who is part of an experiment in creating “better” soldiers that went wrong. Their arrival triggers “David’s” survival mode, and he cuts a swath of destruction through the town focused on eliminating the Peterson’s, as the greatest risk to his continued freedom. With only Luke and Anna left alive, the three are trapped in a burning building when Luke stabs “David” fatally. “David” lives long enough to tell Luke that he did the right thing. The films ends on a genre-appropriate stinger, with Luke and Anna being treated by paramedics and Anna seeing a very much alive “David” leave the building and escape.

In many ways, The Guest is a tonal follow up to Wingard and screen-writer Simon Barrett’s previous collaboration, You’re Next. Both films occupy a sort of hybrid space between a horror film and an action film, and both have “mysteries” at their core which are mostly there for window dressing. Careful viewing of both films even indicates that, in fact, they take place in the same cinematic universe. But while You’re Nextplayed the action/thriller angle almost from the start and kept that tone throughout, The Guest builds up much more of a quiet menace, letting us know that something is very, very wrong with “David” and this situation, and releasing all that tension in an apocalyptic manner. It’s a smart difference given that the theme of this film is very much contrary to what you’d expect out of a “typical” horror movie. In many ways, “David” functions as a Mary Poppins-esque figure. He’s the mysterious stranger that arrives into the lives of this typical family and fixes them in ways that they many not have realized were broken. What they don’t realize, of course, is that he’s fixing things in casually violent and murderous ways. At one point, Spencer even likens a particularly tragic stroke of good fortune he’s experienced at work to wishing on a monkey’s paw.

Other than the “be careful what you wish for” semi-moral of the tale, the film is somewhat slight. Which isn’t a criticism, really, as the film is well shot, well acted, and features extremely relateable and sympathetic characters. The actions scenes are exciting, the scenes of menace are frightening, and when it’s funny it’s genuinely funny. But the film doesn’t aspire to be more than a slightly arch and smart horror-thriller, which occasionally comes across as an excess of self-awareness. That stinger, while tone and genre appropriate, almost doesn’t sit quite with the rest of the film. It turns much of what went before into something of a shaggy-dog story, and while I personally adore that ending, I can’t help but wonder if a less explicit version of the same revelation might have worked better. The smartest thing the film does, though, is leave that central mystery of who “David” really is unresolved. We know he’s not “David”, from a very brief glance at the real “David”, but we know he is unmistakably someone who did know Caleb, in some way, from the military. There’s some room for ambiguity in who he really is and why he really came, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, and the film-makers recognize this and leave it a question that can never be answered because, with this kind of story, there can never be a satisfying answer.

2000AD
This is always one of the highlights for me, as there usually is very little as creative and entertaining, with as good a mix of older and new material, as what 2000AD puts together. This year is no exception, and this is easily one of the better offerings this year.Get it

Archie
Well, the art’s nice. I’ll chalk this up to very much Not For Me and leave it at that.It’s free

Assassin’s Creed
I always forget that this franchise has a silly, sci-fi conspiracy story as a framing device. I can’t see this appealing to anyone outside of existing fans of the franchise, as pretty much nothing happens in the two short stories here other than people talking about things that will only make sense if you’re a fan of the franchise.Avoid

Attack on Titan Anthology
Previews of various works inspired by the manga and anime series that I absolutely fail to see the appeal of. Some of this is quite nicely done, but it’s Not For Me.It’s free

Avatarex
If you asked someone to describe a parody of a Grant Morrison comic, you might get something close to this.
That it’s actually written by Morrison is either brilliant or depressing.It’s free

Awake
Action Lab does some nice kid’s books, and this is a promising start to a sci-fi series with some interesting characters.Get it

Bob’s Burgers
I still don’t get the appeal of the show, but this is pretty good, occassionally inventive all-ages fare.It’s free

Bongo Comics Free-For-All
Excellent cartooning, but every time I look at a Simpsons comic I’m struck by how much less verve they have then even the “shadow of its former self” TV version has.It’s free

Bruce Lee: The Dragon Rises
While this is well done, the “Bruce Lee unfrozen in modern times” conceit is just a little too ghoulish. It leaves me wondering who exactly is the market for something like this.It’s free

Camp Midnight
Visually arresting, unfortunately to the point of unreadability at times. But if you can make out the action, it’s a cute kids books about a summer camp for monsters and the one human girl who goes there.It’s free

Captain America
A really well illustrated story about Captain America punching some Nazis. Which, really, is all anyone could really want.
Also, some back-up nonsense about Spider-Man, but you can skip that.It’s free

Civil War II
The worst thing Marvel intentionally published gets a sequel. It’s Bendis and Cheung, so the competence is there, and of course if you have any intention of following Marvel’s latest semi-annual mega event that changes everything forever for six months, you’ll need to read this.
As super-hero fare goes, it’s inoffensive, but absolutely not for me.It’s free

Comics Lab
A completely random sampler of what I’m presuming are comics published by Z2 comics. This is the sort of sampler I intensely dislike, because it leads with a bright kid-friendly appearing comic of the aggressive whimsey variety, and then gets progressively darker and more violent, meaning it’s really not appropriate for anyone.It’s free

Dark Lily & Friends
A strange little assortment of general ages books, mostly in a kid-friendly horror/magic tone. It all falls squarely in those realms of being neither dull, nor offensive, nor particularly compelling either.It’s free

DC SuperHero Girls
Well, if the completely and totally decimated shelves carrying this merch in Target is anything to go by, this will probably be in short supply. It’s quality is fairly typical of DC all-ages material, but the cliff-hanger ending leading into an ad for a graphic novel that isn’t out yet is pretty disappointing.It’s free

Defend Comics
A good assortment of kid’s comic’s stories, most loosely themed around the concepts of free speech, that does a good job of explaining it to younder readers.Get it

DreamJumper
Scholastic’s graphic novel line puts out some remarkably good books on a regular basis, that mostly get overlooked, it seems, by the online comics community because, well, there’s not much to gripe about with them. The story here isn’t the most original, but it’s well done and the art is very nice, so this could be worth looking out for.It’s free

Doctor Who
Brief, fun enough, stories, but, and bear in mind your source in this, I think I’m full up of just about all I need of anything related to post-relaunch Doctor Who.It’s free

Grumpy Cat (And Pokey!)
While this isn’t as shameless a Garfield rip-off as I suspected it would be. If you have kids who like dumb jokes and cute animals, maybe they’d like it. It’s really not for anyone else.It’s free

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom
H.P. Lovecraft has infiltrated pop culture consciousness to the point where he’s now fodder for an exploitatively cute kid’s comic.
Take that as an condemnation or an endorsement as you will.It’s free

Lady Mechanika
The 90s are back! In steampunk form!Avoid

Legend of Korra
Some nicely illustrated and written stories tying into children’s media franchises I really am not interested in.Avoid

Love and Rockets
At this point if you don’t know that this is going to be the best book in stores for Free Comic Book Day, well, I don’t know what to tell you.Get it

March
Beautifully illustrated and absolutely essential sampler of John Lewis’s autobiographical comics about the height of the civil rights era activism.Get it

Mix Tape 2016
A sampler of titles published under the resurrected Devil’s Due label? Remember them ? I do, but I’ve cared far too much about comics for far too long.
Anyway, this is a mixed bag. I liked Squarriors, a nicely illustrated tale in the genre of ultra-violent small rodent warriors, the most. And only one story made me slightly embarrassed for the comics industry as a whole.It’s free

Mooncop
Starkly beautiful, engaging, and funny comic work by Tom Gauld, otherwise known as “that guy whose cartoons you see without attribution on Tumblr all the time who isn’t Kate Beaton.”Get it

Oddly Normal
Really charming, and lushly illustrated, story of a half-witch girl dealing with school, family, and the usual all-ages fantasy fodder.Get it

One-Punch Man
Well…they tell me it’s good, but I’m not persuaded. Granted, my tastes in boy’s manga runs more to the likes of Assassination Classroom than “we must fight to be better fighters so that we can win the next fight” stories, so I’m not the auidence here anyway.It’s free

Overstreet’s Comic Book Marketplace
And, once again, nothing misses the mark for what this day is supposed to be about more than Overstreet’s offering. Rather than put something out that celebrates comics as an art form, or a form of entertainment, they once again treat comics as an investment, as a damned collectable. And now, joy of joys, they’re even applying that mindset to cosplay. It’s gross.Avoid

The Phantom
The Phantom is one of those properties that I might be interested in some good, quality reprints of, especially given some of the artists that have worked on it over the years. But the quality of the material that Hermes Press puts out is just ugly, with muddy colors and poor reproduction. It literally hurts my eyes to try and read this.Avoid

Pokemon
These are just absolutely peculiar Pokemon gag cartoons. I mean, I suspect the translations are a bit…generous, but it’s just silliness.It’s free

Rom
Literally no one wants this.Avoid

Sanjay and Craig
I am…not a fan of this kind of humor in kid’s cartoons.It’s free

Serenity
With all the really great stuff Dark Horse has put out in the last year, they lead with the thing that suggests they’re feeling the pinch from losing the Star Wars license.
Anyway, there’s a Hellboy story illustrated by Richard Corben in here that’s worth looking at.It’s free

Sonic Sampler
Sonic comics: Yes, they still exist.It’s free

Spectrum
Very nicely illustrated book that largely consists of a collection of sci-fi cliches.It’s free

Strawberry Shortcake
Hey, it’s the revival of the toyetic 80s media property that hasn’t been ruined by horrible nerds because of an ironic joke taken too far!
Anyway, this is cute fun, and a really good example of how to make an appealing kid’s comic out of a licensed property based on horrible puns.It’s free

Street Fighter V
Udon’s books always look pretty.
I never have any idea what’s going on in them, but they look pretty.It’s free

Stuff of Legend
It’s beautiful, of course, and it’s nice to see the original story again. If you haven’t gotten it before, this is as good a time as any.It’s free

Suicide Squad
A reprint of the not terribly impressive first “New 52” relaunch, done in the name of corporate synergy.Avoid

The Tick
Some entertaing and peculiar Tick comics. As usual, this is one of the better books offered for Free Comic Book Day, and consistently has been.Get it

Valiant 2016
Lots of people whose opinions I trust keep talking up the current Valiant books to me, and honestly? There’s a lot of good looking, promising stuff here. But I am not getting into yet another super-hero universe. I’m not sure anyone, anywhere, needs another super-hero univer, to be blunt.
But if you have to, these look pretty good.It’s free

We Can Never Go Home/Young Terrorists
Two really strong, surprisingly effective stories here. They verge into the “grim and gritty” territory that, yes, we all say we’re tired of, yet continue to buy. But the samples here have strong, unique voices that make them something really quite impressive and worth seeking out.Get it

Latice: A Kickstarter backed game a friend picked up, Latice is very much like mainstay-gateway game Qwirkle, only if someone decided that what the later game needed was less straight-forward tile-playing and more thematic artwork. It’s a fairly light abstract game where the goal is to be the first person to play all your tiles. And, like many self-published Kickstarter games, it has issues that become so obvious early into the game you wonder how the designers failed to notice them. In this case, it’s a tremendous reliance on luck, in the form of tiles that allow a player to break placement rules, that can give a single player an insurmountable advantage over others, one that would have been very easily avoided by simply…not randomizing player’s tile pools.

Wombat Rescue: A Kickstarter game I backed, though one from a publisher I generally give the benefit of the doubt to. It fell within my remit for backing games: under $30 with an interesting, non-violent theme. In this case, the players are all wombats trying to find their babies, who have been scattered around the wilderness, all while avoiding dingoes. The game takes advantage of the ubiquity of small wooden cubes in gaming and the fact that wombat poop is square (google it if you don’t believe me) to its advantage, making the game…extremely thematic. It’s a fun game that appears light but has some nice strategic depth, even if, again, it has a couple of rules issues that seem to have escaped the designers.

Codenames: I avoided this New Hotness game for a long time, as I detest “Werewolf”-style games (despite owning at least two) and every description made it seem like one of those. It’s not, at all, it’s more like The $10,000 Pyramid as a party game. In other words, absolutely stupid and boring.

Concordia: A worker placement/area control/drafting style of economic game, only set in ancient Rome instead of medieval Europe. Gameplay-wise, it’s a very well designed game, with multiple paths to victory and enough going on that even a player who is falling behind has things to do. But there’s a little too much going on, and about a dozen different things that give you points at the end of the game, and it’s too long for what it is. I don’t mind games of this sort, but I prefer them to be both shorter and simpler.

Buccaneer Bones: A small-box “push your luck” style dice game to play in fifteen minutes because you don’t have the time or interest to play something meatier. It’s fine.

Mysterium: The English-language adaptation of the Polish game that finds something better to do with “Dixit” style cards than play “Dixit.” There’s an interesting blend of intuition and deduction that I enjoy, but like any game where you’re using abstraction to lead people to concrete answer, the group you play the game with makes it or breaks it. With my group, this is going to be a “once in a while” game, I suspect, as it’s just long enough that most of the people who do enjoy it would rather play something else, and the people who don’t enjoy it would rather play anything else.

Cthulhu Wars: One of the bigger New Hotness games around lately, both in terms of sheer size and popularity, and, despite theming and aggressively unapologetic “Ameritrash” aesthetics, this is actually not a Me game, but rather a Husband game, as the gameplay is, essentially, an asymmetrical take on Risk. The essential simplicity of the rules is part of the appeal, as it gives players something to dig their teeth into once the novelty of huge ass plastic figurines as playing pieces wears off. In fact, there are times that the aesthetics of the game are probably a detriment to it, as the suspiciously yonic 80s metal-band takes on Lovecraftian monsters are, out-of-context, extremely silly. So my advice would be not to play this unless you’re only going to have colossal nerds over to play, which, uh, probably goes without saying.

The stupidest cliche in horror is “humans are the real monsters.” Because, while humans can be venal, selfish, and cruel, the point of comparison here is actual fucking monsters, and as terrible as humans as a whole can be, they’re not brain-sucking ghouls. But we seem to like this idea, judging by how often it comes up, probably because we’re so narcissistic and self-loathing we can’t really imagine anything worse than ourselves. However, if we stretch our genre boundaries a little, and completely remove supernatural hoo-har from the picture, the idea does take on some added power.

We meet Lou Bloom as he’s stealing a chain-link fence to sell as scrap-metal, beating up a security guard and taking his watch in the process. After failing to get a good deal, and being turned down for a job on the reasonable grounds that even a man who buys stolen goods isn’t going to hire a thief, Lou stumbles upon a car crash, accompanied by multiple police cars, and a freelance “news camera crew” run by Joe Loder, and a new career path presents itself to Lou. Selling some more stolen goods nets Lou a small camcorder and a police scanner, and his utterly callous indifference to human suffering gets him some excellent close-up shots of a carjacking victim, footage he sells to “vampire shift” tv news producer Nina Romina. With a little cash, Lou is able to “hire” an intern, Rick, and steadily improve his equipment by going for footage with greater and greater shock value, even going so far as to break into crime scenes and “restage” accidents for more dramatic impact. And when Lou experiences a setback, such as Joe Loder’s crew beating him to a plane crash, some creative tampering with Lou’s van gets him some prime footage of Joe’s own death. Things begin to spiral when Lou comes upon an active crime scene, an apparent home invasion in a wealthy neighborhood. He breaks into the home, and cuts out the footage of the perpetrators before selling it. He uses the footage to track them down and arrange for the police to arrest them in a public place, leading to a shoot out and the deaths of several people, including Rick, who had been asking for more money after realizing what Lou was up to. And, in the end, Lou gets his happy ending, becoming a successful and respected entrepreneur.

Lou is a singularly monstrous figure. There’s no comforting distancing in the film, we as the audience are up close and personal with a sociopath the entire time. There are no attempts made to soften Lou or make him sympathetic. He is essentially a parasite, living and profiting off human pain and misery, and smiling at you as he beats you for a cheap watch. But, as monstrous as Lou is, he exists within a system that is designed to create people like him. Everyone Lou encounters, save possibly Rick, is somehow living off others, from the metal shop owner who knowingly buys stolen goods, to Joe who inspires him, to Nina whose livelihood depends on exploiting the public’s appetite for pain and violence, no one is morally clean. Lou is just better at it than everyone else, probably because, as he admits, he just simply doesn’t like or care about other people at all. It’s hard to fairly evaluate the truthfulness of that statement, because everything that comes out of Lou’s mouth is a rapid string of pattering bullshit (the casualness with which Lou tosses off Malcolm Gladwell-esque aphorisms is his most unsettling verbal tic), but it’s probably the closest time he comes to saying what he’s actually thinking. It’s also the moment when he very clearly decides that it’s time for Rick to die in the line of duty.

Lou is monstrous because he’s recognizable, and he’s the product of a very human system. So, yes, humans can be the real monsters, but only when we bear in mind that, after all, it’s only us out here.

I’ve talked about the weird overlap between horror and comedy before, and how the two genres often work together. But usually when they work best, it’s when one or the other is at the forefront; either a comedic film with horror elements, or a horror film with comedic elements. What’s relatively rarer, and somewhat surprisingly so, is the full black comedy in horror, much less a tragic comedy in horror. It’s probably a harder trick to pull off because it’s especially unsettling when it does happen.

The Voices focuses on Jerry, a pleasant but somewhat shy factory worker in a rather dilapidated post-industrial town. It’s clear early on that Jerry is somewhat…off, in comparison to his co-workers, and part of his employment seems to be supervised by a court appointed psycho-therapist. During planning for a company picnic, Jerry develops a crush on a coworker, Fiona (and remains completely oblivious to the crush coworker Lisa has on him in turn). At home, Jerry lives in a modest apartment over a bowling alley with his dog Bosco and cat Mr. Whiskers. Who talk to him. Bosco is warm and supportive, while Mr. Whiskers is cynical, and both attempt to guide Jerry through his crush on Fiona, who, frankly, is rather creeped out by him. Tragically, while giving Fiona a ride home from work one night, Jerry hits a deer. When Fiona sees Jerry kill the deer (to put it out of it’s misery, as he “heard” it ask him), she runs into the night, and is badly injured by Jerry on accident. And so he puts Fiona out of her misery as well. At home, Bosco and Mr. Whiskers argue over what Jerry should do next, with Bosco advocating going to the police, and Mr. Whiskers urging Jerry to become a serial killer, and Fiona’s severed head chiming in as well. A relationship with Lisa offers Jerry some hope, but that too ends tragically, setting off a chain reaction which eventually leads to the discovery of what Jerry has done. In the end, cornered by the police and trapped in a burning building, Jerry decides to lay down and allow himself to die, as it’s the only way he feels he can be trusted not to hurt anyone else.

Jerry is an intensely sympathetic figure, so when his mistakes turn violent, you feel the horror of it. He’s a bright, friendly man, who sees the world in a fundamentally good way, and there’s a grim, inescapable tragedy to everything that happens that follows from that. Jerry wants to do good, and is trying to do good, but is in a place where he doesn’t understand enough of the context of what is happening to see the wrongness of his actions. In a brilliant and subtle use of visuals, when we see the world through Jerry’s eyes, it’s bright and shining and colorful. When Jerry isn’t around, everything is dull and grey. Even his apartment, which to Jerry is clean and charmingly kitschy, is full of stacks of rotting garbage when we see it via another character. And so, when Jerry kills, we can see the logic of what he thinks he’s doing, even as we understand what’s really happening. It’s tricky to pull off this kind of unreliable viewpoint character in film, but director Marjane Satrapi manages it, both with the visuals and the casting. Everyone in the film is charming, but having an affable “everyman” actor like Ryan Reynolds in the lead helps as well.

It’s also important to note that the film entirely avoids the temptation to make Bosco and Mr. Whiskers anything other than pets that Jerry is externalizing his good and bad urges onto. The film does not shy away from the fact that Jerry is very sick and actively avoiding taking the medicine that he knows he needs to take. Those visual cues are important here, because the abrupt visual shift when Jerry does take his meds again are what drive home that the brightness and optimism we’ve associated with Jerry are actually symptoms of his disease. By the time Jerry is able to accept the full consequences of what he’s done, things are so far gone he doesn’t see any options other than death. Given what we eventually learn over the course of the film about Jerry’s childhood, his mother’s own illness and his father’s abuse, there is a bit of an overplaying of the “tragic inevitability” angle here, which is a little upsetting when dealing with a character who is, essentially, ill. But even so, the film finds a way to end on a upbeat note, bringing Jerry’s optimism full circle in at least a small way.